An intriguing glance at a complex and countercultural personality.
The tempestuous life of 20th-century America’s archprogressive, Dorothy Day (1897-1980).
Loughery (Dagger John: Archbishop John Hughes and the Making of Irish America, 2018) and Randolph (Amelia Earhart, 1990, etc.) provide a serviceable and largely balanced look at one of America’s most complex and socially influential figures. The authors begin with a protracted exploration of Day’s young adulthood, a period rife with cross-county moves, love affairs, and interactions with World War I–era radicals. Her development as a writer, thinker, and activist is intertwined with sometimes-salacious tales of her relationships with intelligent but immature men who too often caused her great pain. Eventually, Day’s plunge into Catholicism redirected her passions while confusing her friends and family. The authors move on to discuss Day’s encounter with mystic wanderer Peter Maurin and the ensuing creation of the Catholic Worker, at once a publication, a collection of communal homes, and a way of life. Moving through the militant 1930s and the desperate 1940s, the authors do a good job of locating Day’s life and work in the midst of a wide variety of colorful characters and contentious controversies. Day was a polarizing figure seemingly with everyone: the church, the government, and fellow activists alike. This reality did not abate as the century matured, though Day’s name moved on from being an FBI target to having near-celebrity status. Though Loughery and Randolph’s work does not provide the personal depth of Kate Hennessy’s exceptional Dorothy Day: The World Will Be Saved by Beauty (2017), they do provide an excellent record of Day’s involvement in the progressive circles of her time. The authors touch on countless personalities within Day’s sphere of influence and use her as a focal point in their exploration of issues ranging from homelessness to homosexuality and historical events ranging from Sacco and Vanzetti to the Spanish Civil War.
An intriguing glance at a complex and countercultural personality.Pub Date: March 3, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-982103-49-1
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2019
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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